Review Summary

Any film that dares attempt a nonjudgmental portrait of Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, would most likely be accused of tastelessness, but in the case of “Chapter 27” — a drama based on Jack Jones’s book “Let Me Take You Down” — the charges are justified. The film’s writer and director, J. P. Schaefer, switches between a docudrama portrait of Mr. Chapman (overplayed by Jared Leto as if he were Truman Capote’s mouth-breathing cousin); silly flights of fancy (including a never-happened encounter between Mr. Chapman and Sean Lennon); and “Taxi Driver”-inspired subjective filmmaking meant to put us inside Mr. Chapman’s crumbling mind. The film also acknowledges pop culture touchstones that supposedly drove Mr. Chapman to homicide, including Beatles songs and J. D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye” (referred to through quotations, borrowed situations, impressionistic cutaways to rye fields and in the film’s title, which refers to a nonexistent final chapter of Mr. Salinger’s book). None of these elements are integrated coherently enough to seem like more than postmodern noodling.
— Matt Zoller Seitz